Is it possible the 17 life-size snapping, frightenly realistic roaring creatures in “Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular” will retire? Get packed away in a dusty warehouse? Or worse, dismantled?

Those who caught this show at Honda Center or Staples Center in 2008 will understand why this is a troubling thought.

Giant puppets were lovingly created to look, sound and move like real dinosaurs. They roll, run or fly around the massive sports floor. They approach the edges of the arena and give you the eye; are you to be their next meal? The jaws open. Roar! You tremble, and wonder: Are you sure they aren’t real?

Lynda Lavin confesses that she was struck by how realistic the creatures were during her first day as resident director of the show a year and a half ago. She has since traveled to 100 cities with the dinosaurs and their 65-member entourage.

Her background is directing and managing touring Broadway shows. Directing the dinosaurs is not terribly different.

“This show is theatrical,” she said. “There is a story and the dinosaurs are the main characters. Each one of them has a choreography and blocking. We deal with lighting and sound. But instead of walking around on a stage, the dinosaurs work in arenas; arenas are the only places big enough for them.”

Understandable when the recreation of the Brachiosaurus – the one with the pleasant face and long neck, like a giraffe – is 36 feet high and 56 feet long from its snout to the end of its tail. The fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex is 23 feet tall and 42 feet long. The smallest dinosaurs, including the lean and mean raptors – remember how terrifying they were in “Jurassic Park”? – are still larger than humans at 8 feet tall and 14 feet long.

A single actor in the role of a paleontologist walks the arena floor with them, explaining how they lived, what they ate and what the earth was like when they existed. He explains how difficult it was for any of them to survive, but survive they did, for 200 million years, in dry deserts and lush rainforests, in shallow seas and thin ice, through volcanic explosions, earthquakes and climate change. Somehow this offers some hope for the human race as it faces such challenges.

If you don’t know the difference between a Triassic and Jurassic, or a Cretaceous and a Cenozoic, you’ll learn it. You find out which dinosaurs were herbivores, and which were meat eaters. There are 10 species represented, including a few you probably don’t know about because they never had a starring role in any Hollywood films.

The notion of this show came in the wake of the BBC-produced 8-hour miniseries, “Walking with Dinosaurs” in 1999, shown here on the Discovery Channel. It used computer graphics to re-create the prehistoric creatures and was highly popular all over the world. Then someone came up with the idea to produce an arena version, so that instead of seeing these prehistoric creatures on a screen, we could see them as they were in real life.

Six years and $20 million later, the Creature Production Co. debuted the first show in Australia in January of 2007, and the dinosaurs have been on the road ever since. The demand has been so high, a third year was added to the original North America tour, and a second set of dinosaurs was made to tour Europe and Asia.

Hundreds of creative hours from engineers and artists made the dinosaurs look astonishingly realistic. Their flesh is made up of a stretch mesh fabric, filled with polystyrene balls and foam that mimic the movement of muscles and fat. Their eyes were designed to have a gleam. Puppeteers control the movements of the big creatures using mini-versions of the creatures, a computer and radio waves to signal the big puppet how and where to move. The largest dinosaurs, which weigh about the same as a small car, are driven around on top of go-karts with roller blade wheels; smaller ones are people in dinosaur suits.

Lavin has grown to love these puppets, and the life that all of the creative efforts of humans have given them.

“They have their own personalities,” she said. “The way their faces are designed, and the sounds they make. They are adorable – well, the herbivores are adorable, not so much the carnivores.”

The Ankylosaurus, a relatively little guy built like an armored tank who was one of the last dinosaurs to walk the earth, is Lavin’s favorite.

“We call him Anky,” she said. “He has such a sweet face. And the way he meanders onto the arena floor on his own – he is just unique.”

Lavin not only directs the shows, working with the crew and the sound and light systems, she supervises the process of packing everything up to get to their next gig. The creatures and sets require 24 53-foot trucks to move from place to place.

“It’s almost like each dinosaur has its own truck, like its own dressing room,” she said.

Lavin looks forward to some time off after the creatures are packed up and shipped back to Australia. But she predicts their retirement won’t be forever.

“In two or three years, people will be talking about bringing them back,” Lavin said. “There will be a whole new generation to see it. And the new technology will give them more bells and whistles.”

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